Review of Gladstein and Regaignon, Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges

Let’s
say you design a ninety-seven-question survey to find out what
writing programs are like at over one hundred private small liberal
arts institutions in the United States—from Agnes Scott, a women's
college in metropolitan Atlanta, to Wofford College, in Spartanburg,
South Carolina. And, let’s say you follow up the survey by
gathering supplemental data to clarify responses—reviewing college
catalogs, web sites, and other site documents—and conducting
individual and focus group interviews. What might you find?

Jill M. Gladstein and Dara Rossman Regaignon’s Writing Program
Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges affirms what one
might suspect: that small, liberal arts institutions value writing
and the teaching of writing. Faculty members in small liberal arts
colleges (SLACs) across the disciplines teach writing, and they see
themselves as teachers of writing. Ninety-six schools in the sample
have first-year writing requirements (98). Thirty-eight of the
sampled schools have a first-year composition requirement (98). And
forty-five schools in the sample have first-year writing seminars
(101). SLACs, moreover, given their primary commitment to
undergraduate education, are twice as likely to have writing across
the curriculum (WAC) programs than the national norm (7). This
orientation has led to a near universal prevalence of writing centers
in the SLAC.

The longstanding commitment to writing in small liberal arts
institutions is a product of their common size and shared genealogy.
Gladstein and Regaignon cite the 1828 Yale Report’s
conclusion that the residential undergraduate college, the study of
Greek and Latin, and writing and rhetoric should remain the defining
features of institutions of higher education in the United States
(6). In fact, small colleges remained committed to this mission
during the second half of the nineteenth century when the landscape
of higher education in the United States was transformed by the
emergence of land grant universities and research-oriented
institutions. And this historical commitment to the use of language
and rhetoric—and to close interaction between faculty and
students—remains the central organizing principle of the
twenty-first century liberal arts college.

To describe this common ethos, Gladstein and Regaignon turn to the
1977 book Marxism and Literature, in which Raymond Williams
describes this ethos as “structures of feeling,” or the “meanings
and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations
between these and formal or systematic beliefs” (qtd. in Gladstein
and Regaignon 132: 7). Williams’ concept of “structures of
feeling” accounts for the “emergent, connecting, and dominant
characteristics” of institutional cultures rooted in their local
histories and committed to a less bureaucratic approach to pedagogy,
curriculum, and program design (qtd. in Gladstein and Regaignon 132:
7).

Gladstein and Regaignon’s project began with a simple but
compelling question: “What, exactly, does writing program
administration at private small liberal arts colleges look like?”
(xv). But that question raised a more complex methodological
question: “How do you find out what writing programs at small
colleges look like?” (23). Gladstein and Regaignon develop a
descriptive method for identifying the role of writing, as well as an
opportunity to theorize what this description might mean for the
field of writing studies (23). Their “grounded theory” and “mixed
methods analysis” offer a model for further scholarship on the
culture of writing at particular institutional sites.

Gladstein and Regaignon’s research builds on the work of Gretchen
Flesher Moon, Patricia Donahue, Thomas Amorose, Paul Hanstedt, and
others who established the Small College Special Interest Group in
the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC); those
who contributed to a special issue of Composition Studies
(2004) focused on the SLAC, edited by Handstedt and Amorose; and
contributors to the book Local Histories (2007), edited by
Moon and Donahue. This line of inquiry is significant: it affirms
that the distinctive values, history, and material conditions in the
twenty-first century small college do not necessarily align with the
normative histories and values of the larger university-based writing
program.

The study draws on a sample of one hundred private small liberal arts
colleges distributed geographically across the United States and
having enrollments ranging from 592 to 3,966 students (26). The
colleges that comprise the study are members of the Annapolis
Group, a consortium of over 130 leading national liberal arts
colleges across the United States that “promotes the value of a
liberal arts education while providing a forum for member
institutions to collaborate, shape the dialog on higher education at
a national level, and develop new ways—both individually and
collectively—to serve the public good.” The sample includes
seven women’s colleges and three men’s colleges as well as two
historically black colleges (26). The primary instrument is a
ninety-seven-question survey that sought information in six primary
areas: administrative structure; writing requirements, including
first-year writing and WAC; writing centers; faculty development;
assessment; and identification and support for diversely prepared
learners (27). Gladstein and Regaignon report that “in the end, 109
schools responded to the survey, yielding an 80% return rate,” and
“eighty-nine of the one hundred schools in the final data set
answered questions beyond the original survey via e-mail, over the
phone, or in person” (29). The data includes both the explicitsites of writing (such as the Writing Center or the Director
of Writing) and implicit or embedded sites of writing (writing
requirements within programs or administrative roles that include the
oversight of writing).

Gladstein and Regaignon’s “grounded theory” and “mixed
methods analysis” weave together survey, interview, and focus group
data, site document analysis, and institutional history to map the
sites of writing at small colleges today. Their findings include
diffuse administrative structures that support writing and complex
configurations of leadership. Examining the leadership configuration
of an institution’s writing program, they conclude, “is a key
step in understanding not just the local culture of writing but also
the material conditions that shape it” (64). These configurations
range from program directors (of first-year writing, WAC, or Writing
in the Disciplines [WID]) to more centralized models at twenty-nine
schools that consolidate all of the writing initiatives in a single
Writing Program Administrator or WPA.

Of course, describing the administrative and leadership
configurations does not explain the status of Writing Program
Administrators (WPAs) or Writing Center Directors (WCDs)—what these
leaders actually do, as well as their authority and influence on a
given campus. Indeed, as Gladstein and Regaignon explain, in the SLAC
“the status of WPA positions and the responsibilities they
encompass are tied together in messy and complex ways” (69). Their
approach to these complexities is to examine existing scholarship on
the WPA and WCD alongside the complex and specific programmatic
configurations they find among the institutions in their sample.
Gladstein and Regaignon conclude, “fully understanding the
relationship between the culture of writing and the leadership
configuration is essential to supporting, developing, or changing
that culture” (66).

The subsequent parts of Writing Program Administration at Small
Liberal Arts Colleges are divided into a discussion of issues
associated with “curriculum-centered writing instruction”
(writing requirements, staffing first-year writing, and leadership
configurations) and “student-centered writing instruction”
(writing centers, supporting diversely prepared writers). In small
colleges, the curriculum-centered and student-centered sites for
writing can remain distinct, overlap, or reflect tensions in the
evolving cultures of writing in the small college. Gladstein and
Regaignon analyze these sites using the previously noted distinction
between explicit and embedded writing instruction—“a
distinction that is particularly important to understanding writing
instruction at small colleges” (96). It is notable, too, that in
nearly all of the schools in the sample the culture of writing is in
transition as faculties explore ways to build verticality into the
writing curriculum, from first-year courses to senior capstones.

In their chapter on staffing first-year writing, Gladstein and
Regaignon remind their readers that the small colleges in the
Annapolis Group sample include some of the wealthiest institutions in
the country. As a result, the questions about staffing in these
schools are more often than not focused on intellectual expertise
rather than labor conditions (121). In fact, all but “two of
the seventy-seven schools that provided class size data comply with
the CCCC guideline of keeping class sizes below twenty, and 44% meet
the ideal of fifteen or smaller” (122). As Gladstein and Regaignon
note, “These figures contrast sharply with national norms” (122).

It is also striking how few faculty at small colleges who teach
first-year writing are specialists in the field of rhetoric and
composition. “Only 27% of the sections of first-year composition
and only 9% of the sections of first-year seminars are taught by
writing specialists,” according to Gladstein and Regaignon’s
findings (126-27). This shared ownership of writing reflects the
institutional commitment to undergraduate education at the same time
it presents distinct challenges and opportunities for faculty
development initiatives around writing. For example, keeping faculty
involved in the teaching of writing, and recruiting as well as
training and supporting new faculty in effective writing pedagogy,
requires leadership and institutional commitment. Moreover, the
tension between program needs and the needs of a general studies
curriculum will inevitably lead to challenges when determining
equitable faculty workloads.

The final chapters focus on writing centers, supporting diversely
prepared writers, and assessment. Gladstein and Regaignon begin their
chapter on writing centers by showing how the guiding metaphor of
writing center scholarship does not necessarily apply to the small
school. For both philosophical and material reasons, at small
institutions, “margins and center simply cannot be terribly far
apart” (157). In their discussion of diversely prepared writers, in
addition, small and mostly selective schools are less likely to
systematically identify students with special needs and too often
place the responsibility of working with these students on peer
tutors. Finally, in their chapter on assessment, Gladstein and
Regaignon note that the distinctive structures of feeling of small
colleges—“their size, the immediacy and pervasiveness of faculty
governance, not to mention a penchant for individual
experimentation”—make these institutions potentially generative
sites for creative assessment (202).

Of course the enduring values of small colleges can also create
disincentives to change as well. As a faculty member and former chair
at a public liberal arts college, I know first-hand how conditions
for teaching and learning evolve as leadership and staffing
structures change. On the one hand, intimacy and community can
foster a collective commitment to improving working conditions for
teaching and learning. On the other hand, a less-centralized and more
diffuse culture of writing is susceptible to less flexible
educational values of the faculty across the college who teach
writing. Indeed, sustaining a vibrant culture of writing in a small
school requires recognizing as well as continually re-examining the
material and historical conditions that make new opportunities
possible. For the struggle of existing values and emergent conditions
will continue to challenge small institutions and their faculties as
they strive to deepen or reaffirm their commitment to writing
instruction. Any descriptive account of leadership configurations
simply cannot capture these complex structural and interpersonal
dynamics in particular institutional cultures.

Nevertheless, Gladstein and Regaignon’s “grounded theory”
convincingly answers an important set of questions. In what ways are
small liberal arts college writing programs distinctive? What can we
learn from the configurations of leadership and authority in these
schools? And what can these programs offer other institutions seeking
to address the ever-present challenges of developing student writers?
If a reader is framing these kinds of questions, Writing Program
Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges will offer answers,
as well as inspiration, for further research projects on writing
program administration.